Van den Heuvel “discovered
haiku in San Francisco in 1958 when he heard Gary Snyder talking about short
poems at a Sunday gathering of the Robert Duncan/Jack Spicer poetry group in
North Beach.” He “was known as ‘Dutchy’ when he played catcher in the late
1940s for the Comets, a sandlot team in Dover, New Hampshire.” From a volume of
baseball haiku edited by Van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura (W.W. Norton &
Co., 2007).

I
could not resist drawing attention to poetry that so skillfully joins a
fondness for both baseball and haiku. And it seems this might be considered
serendipitous, as haiku is a combination of two words: haikai (literally,
‘comic,’ ‘unorthodox’) and hokku, the latter a three line stanza and the former
meaning “sportive” or “playful.” Bashō, a haikai master, sought to exemplify in
his poetry both comic playfulness and spiritual depth, an uncommon blend of the
vita contemplativa,which
he practiced on his own terms, with the vita activa, evidenced in his willingness
to take seriously “the ordinary, everyday lives of commoners,” portraying such
figures as the beggar, the traveler and the farmer.

The first “baseball haiku” (1890) issues from the
brush of the first modern haiku poet, Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), whose “writings
on baseball later helped to popularize the game throughout Japan.”

spring breezethis grassy field makes mewant to play catch—Masaoka Shiki

On the origins of
haiku, see “A Note on Haikai, Hokku,
and Haiku,” appended to Robert Hass, ed., The
Essential Haiku: Versionsof Bashō, Buson, and Issa (Hopewell, NJ:
The Ecco Press, 1994).

Images: Painting by Kadir Nelson found here. Picture of Shiki found here.

Subscribe to Ratio Juris

Search FindLaw's database of Supreme Court decisions since 1893 (U.S. Reports, volumes 150-present). Browsable by U.S. Reports volume number and by year. Searchable by citation, case title, and full text.